83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes

(CNN) -- If you're using a fake name on your Facebook account, maintaining a personal profile for your beloved pet or have a second profile you use just for logging in to other sites, you have one of the 83.09 million fake accounts Facebook wants to disable.

In an updated regulatory filing released Wednesday, the social media company said that 8.7 percent of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.

"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts," Facebook's chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent interview. "Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities."

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So what are those 83 million undesired accounts doing? They're a mixture of innocent and malicious, and Facebook has divvied them up into three categories: duplicate accounts, misclassified accounts and "undesirable" accounts.

Duplicate accounts make up 4.8% (45.8 million) of Facebook's total active member tally. According to the network's terms of service, users are not allowed to have more than one Facebook personal account or make accounts on behalf of other people. Parents creating Facebook accounts for their young kids are violating two rules, since people under 13 are not allowed to have Facebook profiles.

Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that have been made for companies, groups or pets. Those types of profiles (22.9 million) are allowed on Facebook, but they need to be created as Pages. Facebook estimates that 2.4% of its active accounts are these non-human personal accounts. These accounts can be converted into approved pages without losing information. Pets such as Boo, the self-anointed "world's cutest dog," are typically classified as Public Figures.
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The third group is the smallest -- just 1.5% of all active accounts -- but most troublesome. There are 14.3 million undesirable accounts that Facebook believes have been created specifically for purposes that violate the companies terms, like spamming.

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"We believe the percentage of accounts that are duplicate or false is meaningfully lower in developed markets such as the United States or Australia and higher in developing markets such as Indonesia and Turkey," the company said in the filing. The tallies were based on an internal sampling of accounts done by reviewers, and Facebook says the numbers may represent the actual number.

Facebook disables any false accounts it finds, and while it wipes all the information associated with the name from public view, it doesn't delete the account from its servers "for safety and security" reasons. The disabled account goes into a sort of Facebook limbo, where the owner of the account can't get their hands on any of the content -- photos, posts, videos -- not even by requesting a copy of the data, according to Facebook.

If Facebook does shut down your account, it says you can't create a new one without permission from the company.

I wrote and Exposed the business model before the IPO, the joke of Ads, affiliates, click rates, etc. The over-hype sensationalism by Business Media and Fascist Corporate Media of the world, which never peeled back the layers of this scamming onion. I know of one other person that shorted this joke of a company, because we know of plenty alternative and a mutipilicity of fake accounts on this joke site. MySpace was the warning shot...

"All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man, let the annual return of this day(July 4th), forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."Thomas JeffersonJune 1826

I wrote and Exposed the business model before the IPO, the joke of Ads, affiliates, click rates, etc. The over-hype sensationalism by Business Media and Fascist Corporate Media of the world, which never peeled back the layers of this scamming onion. I know of one other person that shorted this joke of a company.

I don't like anything this company does, from its creepy data sniffing, to turning information over to the cops, but that aside, the idea that this outfit was somehow worth +100 billion dollars was insanity.

I don't like anything this company does, from its creepy data sniffing, to turning information over to the cops, but that aside, the idea that this outfit was somehow worth +100 billion dollars was insanity.

+a bunch. Would you believe our friends eduardo and kiwi actually used their REAL personal info on that site? They've both shut down their profiles recently for personal reasons (i.e. ed doesn't want his ex spying on him), but that data is still out there on teh interwebs!

Originally Posted by Torchbearer

what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.

+a bunch. Would you believe our friends eduardo and kiwi actually used their REAL personal info on that site? They've both shut down their profiles recently for personal reasons (i.e. ed doesn't want his ex spying on him), but that data is still out there on teh interwebs!

Having a good troll account can always come in handy. Facebook makes it a little more difficult but time is everything. People will add and try to talk to some pretty pictures, even when they never answer back.

Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that have been made for companies, groups or pets. Those types of profiles (22.9 million) are allowed on Facebook, but they need to be created as Pages. Facebook estimates that 2.4% of its active accounts are these non-human personal accounts. These accounts can be converted into approved pages without losing information.

Ditto. It may even cost ed custody/visitation of his daughter if the wife's lawyer gets her way.

"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts," Facebook's chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent interview. "Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities."

I'll be $#@!ed if I know, brother. I was shocked to find how much personal info people just give away on FB when I made my artists' page. It used to take some effort to get women to tell you these things...now you just have to look them up on FB.

Originally Posted by Torchbearer

what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.

If Facebook does shut down your account, it says you can't create a new one without permission from the company.

LOL! They want to make money off of their users by selling their information so they can't stop new accounts from being created without permission unless they start banning IP addresses. Facebook is a joke. If they dare start charging users to post on facebook over 75% of users would leave. There is nothing stopping people from creating an account with a real life person's name that doesn't have a facebook and spamming with that account.

When you exist as an entity to sell private information about people then don't be surprised when people use that network to destroy your company. Facebook is crashing and burning, and I love it!

If they don't delete fake accounts they're damned. If they do delete fake accounts they're damned.

I can see the "FACEBOOK CENSORS RON PAUL ACCOUNTS!!!" threads spring up like crazy if they did delete accounts. How many fake Ron Paul supporter accounts are there? Lots, from my experience. Personally, I do not give a $#@!, but people would be bitching twice as loud if they did start deleting fake accounts.

"The average person figures that the president tells the truth, the vice president tells the truth, the secretary of state tell the truth; and they don't. They don't. The founders understood that people would be flawed, that political leaders would not be the best of men … so they set forth the constitution. We don't follow the constitution in this country; had we done so in 2001 and 2002, the world would be a different place" - Karen Kwiatkowski

(after ONE year as a "member") User's Facebook Data Request Produces 1222 Pg PDF on CD

Facebook apparently collects more data about yourself and your activities than you may realize.

24-year-old Facebook user Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria recently sent a formal request to the social network and asked for a copy of every piece of personal information the site has collected on him since he created an account a year ago. According to ThreatPost, EU Directive 95/46/EC (PDF) grants each person the right to access data relating to him/her in order to verify the accuracy of that data and the lawfulness of how long it's being used. What he eventually received was a CD packing a 1,222 page collection in a single PDF file.

To Schrems' surprise, much of the data he discovered to be retained in Facebook's records were previously believed to be deleted. These records included the times when Schrems logged in and out of Facebook, the times and content of every message sent and received, and an "accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded." Facebook kept records of friend requests, photos, employment and relationship statuses, and former or alternative names and email addresses.

Note: Facebook is storing even more data categories. This is the (current) list of all data: PDF (485 KB)
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What facebook knows about you

A couple of months ago the Austrian law student Max Schrems asked facebook to send him all their data stored about him. All Europeans have a right to do this. Because facebook is based in Dublin, Ireland. It took a while and then facebook sent Max a CD with 1222 PDF files. - Read more at http://www.taz.de/facebook-en

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Thanks Max Schrems!

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Even if one doesn't use farcebook, most people are being tracked via LSO cookies! Which are *not* deleted with standard "cookie deleters", and contain Much Much more info.

I'll be $#@!ed if I know, brother. I was shocked to find how much personal info people just give away on FB when I made my artists' page. It used to take some effort to get women to tell you these things...now you just have to look them up on FB.

Hey, this is the Age of Popularity.

We've had an entire generation, now in their early twenties, who have grown up watching a parade of reality shows. Not famous? Why, if you're not famous, you're nobody! Notice the trend of late, how anyone - ANYONE - who has even remotely garnered any public attention goes after their own reality show? Bristol Palin? Rielle Hunter? Seriously??

I can't help but wonder if the "anyone can be a reality star" mentality is what drives people, at least in part, to post so much of themselves and their (formerly) private lives online.

Back in the good old days young aspiring starlets used to hang out in soda fountains waiting to get "discovered" by Hollywood. Today? Today the route to fame seems to be posting every facet of one's life onto Facebook and hoping those YouTube vids and sex tapes go viral..... and God help ya if you have less than a million Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

I noticed something funny about the rest of the Flock. Turns out they were all Artificial Sheep!

Originally Posted by Anti Federalist

Good for you.

I don't like anything this company does, from its creepy data sniffing, to turning information over to the cops, but that aside, the idea that this outfit was somehow worth +100 billion dollars was insanity.

It could also be estimated taht $100 Billion is the COST of the Loss of Privacy to the People, $#@! the company.

Last edited by DamianTV; 08-04-2012 at 03:43 AM.

1776 > 1984

The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintian an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.